Reading Response: “The Dead” as exemplar of Modernism

As I read “The Dead” again for class, I remembered how long the story is. When I finished I was tempted to say that the title must refer to the state of the reader after getting through the whole thing; but then I thought, no, that wouldn’t be the kind of thing that a responsible English teacher would write… :)

Anyway, it’s definitely the longest story we’ll be reading in the short story section of this class. And I realized that the story's length, along with the obscurity of some of the references, can make it hard to make sense of the first time through.

But that's not always a bad thing - to struggle with a text can be very fruitful in developing reading skills. Even if you don't know all the names or political events that are referenced by the characters, you can learn to read context clues to get the gist of a given moment in a story.

For example, in "The Dead," at one point the main character Gabriel dances with a woman named Miss Ivors. She represents the Irish nationalistic movement of the time, which was attempting to break Ireland free of English rule. She's upset with Gabriel for writing for a paper, the Daily Express, which takes a more conservative, pro-English stance. But even if you don't know all that, you can still get the sense of the uneasiness of the scene just by reading it and paying attention. Joyce's writing allows you to feel the tension between them, even if you don't know the particulars of their political dispute.

Understanding the themes
There are so many things we could talk about for this story. It's been studied and written about many, many times. (And because of that, and because it's so long, this blog will probably be longer than most of the reading response posts should be).

This a story with a ton of rich symbolism. And as a work of modernism, as discussed in the last blog post, it creates a great deal of ambiguity and uncertainty. It often seems to be holding up conflicting emotions and viewpoints side-by-side. A few fragmented reactions:
- The elaborate holiday celebration reminded me of many similiar celebrations in my own family. Joyce does a great job describing both the joys and the hidden tensions, often simmering beneath the surface, which we often find in such circumstances.
- The meal is described in great detail. It's a moment of communion, as Thomas Foster discusses in his book "How To Read literature Like a Professor." But with Joyce, there's always an ironic element, so we can see that during the meal this communion between the characters is less than perfect.
- In fact, one way to see this is in Gabriel's speech. He makes some comments which are actually quite rude to his aunts! I think Joyce likes to put his characters into a common setting which normally brings up ideas of togetherness and connection, and he inserts some slight moments of discord.
- The symbolism of the weather (particularly the snow) which recurs throughout the story, is very interesting. Typically, the warmth of the inside of a house is contrasted with the coldness of the outside world. But Joyce turns this on its head a couple of times - once he even has Gabriel look out and wish he were out alone in the snow instead of in the house! It's an interesting moment which shows how even "warmth" and "hospitality" can sometimes become onerous or burdensome.
- The main "epiphany" or "revelation" at the end of the story is centered on Gabriel. I won't spoil it here, but we should all think about it in terms of the Foster book Chapter 1 - the issue of the quest for self-knowledge. What self-knowledge does Gabriel come to at the end of the story?

On this point, I want to try to make the beginnings of an argument about the story - and I want to connect it to our ongoing discussion about the "sacramental" view of life. One of the seven Catholic sacraments, of course, is marriage, which is a central point in "The Dead."

What is Joyce saying about marriage through the story of Gabriel and his wife Gretta? Does he seem to think there is hope for their marriage? Or not? And how does he reveal this through his writing choices?

I think that ultimately, the answer to this lies in how we read the final few paragraphs of the story, which some people read as positive, some as negative. There's evidence for both readings - it's modernism, so it's ambiguous.

Again, without spoiling the end too much, I would say that I think Joyce, in his heart of hearts, does still hold onto a sacramental understanding of marriage, in one sense. I think that he has his main character, Gabriel, undergo an experience in this story in which his false, man-made illusions about his marriage are stripped away (just like his illusions about himself are stripped away when he looks in the mirror in the last scene). Perhaps, this removal of his false view of marriage will prepare the way for a better, deeper understanding.

"The Dead" and Free Indirect Discourse
Finally, one of the key things that "The Dead" can help us understand about modern fiction is the idea of "free indirect discourse." Joyce was one of the founding fathers, so to speak, of this style of writing, in which the narrator's voice often merges with the characters' voices. The excerpt from James Wood's How Fiction Works which we read for class described this same style and mentioned Joyce a couple of times. Also, I found a great description of how the free indirect style works in "The Dead," written by Wallace Gray. Here is an excerpt:

There are a number of terms for narrated monologue: free indirect discourse, empathetic narrative, stylistic inflection...These are all ways of indicating that the prose style changes depending upon the nature of the character that the narration is about; another way of putting it is to say that the fictional character begins to make authorial choices, that the character "infects" the prose style of the writer.

As an example from Dubliners, let us look at the first sentence of "The Dead":

"Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."

Now, a precise stylist would want to change this to "figuratively run off her feet." But the use of literally in this context is one that uneducated people, such as the housemaid Lily, frequently employ. What has happened here is that Lily, the character being written about, has, shall we say, literally taken the pen from the author and begun to use expressions that would come naturally to her; in other words, she has infected the author's style with her own personality. To continue, the third sentence of this opening paragraph reads:

"It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also, ... "

The expression "well for her" is the kind of language a Dubliner of her economic and social caste would use; here, it becomes part of the author's style.

Indeed, we can see that the authorial voice of the nineteenth-century writer, which was that of the distinct character of the writer, has become multilingual rather than monolingual. This becomes evident at the opening of the second paragraph:

"It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat."

Now, this is no longer Lily's voice. The topic has shifted to the opinions of middle-class Dubliners, the typical party guests at this event, and so they have grabbed the pen of the author and are using their own Dublin speech in the choice of words and in the rhythms of the sentences.

This is an excellent explication of how Joyce uses "free indirect style" in "The Dead." Gray also has lots of other great things to say about Joyce and his writing in Dubliners, check it out yourself if you need additional help understanding his stories.